Members gave Yellen a deadline of June 14 to provide a report analyzing the applicability of the Iran sanctions.
House GOP lawmakers called on the Biden administration to apply unprecedented sanctions to Chinese military-linked firms that support Iranian terrorist activity and Tehran’s oil industry, National Review has learned.
The Republican members of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party wrote to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Thursday, requesting that she investigate six Chinese military companies for their Iran ties.
The letter, obtained by National Review, marks an important development in the committee’s work, which up to this point had focused primarily on the threat posed by U.S. capital flows that bulk up China’s military ahead of a possible war between the two countries in the future.
The lawmakers wrote that U.S. funds have likely contributed to campaigns orchestrated by a foreign adversary — in this case, Iran — that have already killed Americans.
“It is indefensible for the United States to permit investments that aid and abet Iran’s backing of militant groups in the Middle East that have killed U.S. military personnel and threaten geopolitical stability,” wrote the lawmakers, who were led by committee chairman representative John Moolenaar.
“Continuing to do so jeopardizes U.S. values and national security.”
The other signatories are Representatives Rob Wittman, Blaine Luetkemeyer, Andy Barr, Dan Newhouse, Darin LaHood, Neal Dunn, Jim Banks, Dusty Johnson, Michelle Steel, Ashley Hinson, and Carlos Gimenez.
They’re concerned by the fact that the firms in question have collectively received billions of dollars in U.S. capital through a range of different investments and urged Yellen to consider sanctioning them under existing Iran-related authorities that target collaboration with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — a U.S.-designated foreign-terrorist organization — and with Iran’s oil industry.
In a report it issued earlier this year, the committee found that U.S. financial institutions have funneled $6.5 billion to dozens of Chinese firms that had been blacklisted by Washington for their ties to the CCP’s military-surveillance complex.
The companies that the committee listed are Norinco, AVIC, COSCO, CNOOC, CRRC, and Sinopec.
According to the committee, each of these companies, respectively, smuggles rifles to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, supplies the IRGC with aircraft, ships oil to Iran in contravention of U.S. sanctions, works on projects with a sanctioned Iranian oil company, collaborates with a sanctioned Iranian military logistics entity, and develops Iranian oil fields.
Each of those companies, except for Norinco, has been designated under U.S. blacklists for Chinese military companies maintained by Treasury or the Pentagon. The Pentagon blacklist is largely symbolic, and the Treasury-maintained list blocks Americans from buying publicly traded shares of those firms. The Iran sanctions urged by the committee are much stronger; they would apply to all transactions with the Chinese companies in question and subject them to asset freezes.
“The United States must counter the new authoritarian axis spearheaded by the PRC and Iran and penalize those PRC companies that help fund Iran’s activities to support Houthi attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea and stoke attacks against Israel by Hamas, Hezbollah, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad,” the lawmakers wrote.
They gave Yellen a deadline of June 14 to provide a report analyzing the applicability of the Iran sanctions, under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act and the Iran Freedom and Counter Proliferation Act.